Robert Smithson Art Quotations

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time.

Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art .

Painting, sculpture and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues.

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.